Nature and Trash

It’s important to get out of your daily routine and get back to nature, even if you didn’t really come from nature to begin with, you can go back and pretend. That’s what the staff of the international school and I did today. A boat ride around the Biesbosch just outside Dordrecht was both educational and completely relaxing. Plus I got to speak Dutch, which is always a welcome exercise in a different environment. The Biesbosch is a huge national park which was largely planned, in typical Dutch style, in the early 20th century. I’m always impressed with the strong mix of environmental consciousness and manipulation that they incorporate all over the country. I think in the states the choice is more for the manipulating, than anything else.

We also visited Dordrecht an extremely old city near Rotterdam. It was so quiet, and so picturesque, made me wonder if I’m not missing out on the calm life living in Amsterdam. Naaah.

I wanted to share the following two photos: the first is a typical houseboat in Dordrecht, which I’m sure I could never afford, notice the clothes hangin out to dry

This second photo will be of particular interest to my friends at 2600.

A woman was taking out her trash. She had the usual black garbage bag with her, and she walked across the street from her home, and instead of just opening the lid to this container, she pulled out a scannable keycard! We stopped our tour and immediately asked what she was doing. I found the explanation extremely odd, she said that it ensures that only people in this neighborhood could use this trash container. She also said something about taxes and different neighborhood trash systems. I still don’t get it, anybody heard of this?

A bit of lighter news, I’m now using google’s new gmail as a betatester. Blogger users can now sign up for their own @gmail.com accounts. So far I think it’s nice, 1000 MB is a welcome factor. No sign of those “related to my email content” ads, yet.